


Drawing Circles

by Acai



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Angst, M/M, iwaoi - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-07
Updated: 2016-11-07
Packaged: 2018-08-29 14:16:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8492950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Acai/pseuds/Acai
Summary: Everybody had something that they’d lost. Everybody had something that they loved. Everybody had something that they feared. And to Iwaizumi, Oikawa was all three.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a short little something that I thought up while walking home from studying with a friend today. I didn't know what to tag it, but this works I suppose.

**Theory of Happiness**

 

The way Iwaizumi tended to understand things was as follows: you either become something beautiful, or you live to see yourself as something terrible. And the thing was, for all the fuss, in the end it really didn’t matter. 

 

Of course, saying it that way made it sound as if everybody should strive to be beautiful rather than terrible. As if terrible people really cared that they were terrible. Iwaizumi would have liked to think that everybody wanted to be wholly good, but in order to be wholly bad you wouldn’t really care all too much about being beautiful. Or maybe the terrible people all cared a terribly large amount, and they hated that they were bad, but they couldn’t stop being bad. That would have been worse, in Iwaizumi’s opinion, because then everybody suffered. 

 

So what a shame it was that good people suffered too. How rare was it for somebody to be something beautiful? Iwaizumi could name a grand total of three wonderful people—two of whom, bless them, could save their eulogies for another day. It seemed rather pressing that he’d compose something for the third, however, in a pretty quick amount of time. How long had he sat, trying? There was nothing to say that would work, after all. He could be honest, of course. Take a blunt approach and talk to the third himself. He could say,

_ It really sucks that you’re dead because I really, really loved you, and I want you to come back, but everybody keeps telling me to stop wanting that. They keep telling me it’ll stop hurting soon, but the thing is, I don’t want it to stop hurting. I want to ache and ache and ache forever until that’s all I feel, and until you’re all I know. I want to ache so hard that I can’t forget the way that your hands felt or the way that your face looked, or the way that you laughed, or the way your voice sounded, smooth and deep. I want to hurt so deeply for you that it becomes engraved into my heart the way that you smelled. I want to spend more nights doing dumb things that we’d get in trouble for and I want to spend more nights kissing your dumb face, and most of all I want to spend more nights with you, because in the long run, you’re really all that I care to care about. I hate you for doing this and I hate everything that you ever stood for, but I only hate it because it’s not mine anymore. _

 

The thing about  _ that _ approach, however, was that he’d be saying it to a room full of people who never really understood a thing about Oikawa in the first place. Who wouldn’t be able to understand what he was saying, and who didn’t deserve to hear the things that he wanted to admit. And so Iwaizumi could write to  _ them, _ the audience, because who really believed that Oikawa was listening anyway? And to them, he’d fill the room with white noise in the form of words, to pretend that he never loved as deeply as he did, and to pretend that he felt differently than he truly did. To them, he’d say the same sober, plain words that they’d all be saying. 

_ I am grateful, first of all, to have had the privilege of knowing him. I am grateful that I was able to spend twenty six years with him, and I will never stop being grateful for that. I am not grateful that it ended so soon, but I’m glad there’s so many people who will remember him for who he was, and for what he loved, and for everything that he ever was. _

 

But those words would just echo around the room and nobody would listen, or maybe they would and they would pretend to understand, but they wouldn’t. They’d nod along with him and that would only infuriate him, because they didn’t understand Oikawa the way that Iwaizumi did, and nobody  _ loved _ Oikawa the way that Iwaizumi did. And, Heaven on high, Oikawa would have  _ hated  _ this. He would have made a joke or two about the fancy outfitting, and then he would have planned some kind of way to get out of it. Oikawa hated crying, Oikawa hated lying, and Oikawa hated empty words. He would have found three hundred ways to get out of an event which would have excess amounts of all three of those things. 

 

The thing about speech-giving, of course, was that you didn’t have to give the speech if you didn’t show up to give it. And the thing about fancy outfitting, apparently, was that it took thrice as many minutes to put it on than it did to take it off. Iwaizumi discovered both of those things in the span of an hour. Instead of a room full of crying, stuffy women and stone-faced, sober men, Iwaizumi ended up knees-deep in a muddy creek talking to a murky stream of fast-flowing water that wasn’t listening. Or, maybe it was. Maybe it was catching every single word and sweeping them away with the current. Maybe the words would scatter miles and miles away from each other and entangle with other words that had been breathed to it. Perhaps Iwaizumi was standing in a wet congregation of things that nobody was willing to say to anything that could really understand the weight of the words and the emotions dripping from them.

 

They’d gone to the creek when they’d been little kids, back before Oikawa’s mind was dark and back before Iwaizumi had understood how badly you could hurt without ever even being touched. And back before Oikawa’s benevolent unequivocality had been too much for his own good. They’d go out to the lake, and Iwaizumi would catch the little bugs that lingered on top of the water while Oikawa got his shoes all muddy and talked Iwaizumi’s ear off. It was silent, now, and there weren't any water bugs waiting to be caught, but it was still the same lake. And so Iwaizumi talked to it. 

 

Iwaizumi hated speeches. He hated feelings and he hated misery and he hated a world without Oikawa in it. And, because Oikawa wasn’t here to hate things anymore, Iwaizumi would hate the things that Oikawa hated for him. He’d hate spiders and liars and losing and breathing. But though he now hated breathing, he’d do that for Oikawa too. He’d play volleyball and he’d go to family dinners and he’d breathe a long stretch of time more, even if Oikawa had hated some of those things, because some things he’d loved and some things he’d wanted to do and some things he probably should have done more of. He probably should have gone to more family dinners, even if he’d hated the noise and even if he’d hated the questions from his family members, because he’d loved his family. Oikawa had liked letting his little cousins put ribbons in his hair and he’d liked talking to his older sister about anything and everything and he’d liked spending time in the kitchen with his mom helping her bake. 

 

He’d liked volleyball and the feeling of hitting the ball and the redness of his arms after practice and the ache in his knees and the way that his knees would turn red and sweaty from wearing his knee pads for too long and the smell of the gym and the adrenaline in his veins. He’d loved winning and he’d liked losing, it didn’t really matter so long as he got to play. 

 

Iwaizumi didn’t care that he was ‘lucky to have known Oikawa,’ because it hurt now to not know him. 

 

Iwaizumi didn’t care that ‘Oikawa had lived a good long life,’ because it had been too short and it hadn’t been good, he’d only been pretending all along. Every part of Iwaizumi ached and ached and ached, but he didn’t want to stop aching. After the aching stopped, there wouldn’t be anything left to feel.

 

Oikawa had given Iwaizumi a best friend. Oikawa had given Iwaizumi somebody to love. Oikawa had given Iwaizumi somebody to never want to part from for more than a day. Oikawa had given Iwaizumi a scar in the shape of a zig-zag on his knee. Oikawa had given Iwaizumi the promise of a lifetime, and yet had yanked it all away in the timespan of one night. Oikawa had given Iwaizumi this painful, aching longing. Iwaizumi had lost all of those things, except for the hurting. And dammit, Iwaizumi would cling to that pain like it was his lifeline. What had it been, to have made Oikawa tick the way that he had? Had it been all the raucous noise that he’d always hated? Had it been every despotic winter he’d spent complaining to Iwaizumi about? Had it been all the merriment stolen from him that had left him only with sovereign, aching parts of his mind?

 

Nobody had given Oikawa that ache except for himself. Of course he hadn’t wanted to keep it.

 

Maybe the world had captivated Oikawa without ever letting him fly, maybe the world had chained him down. Yes, death was cruel. It was cruel and unforgiving, but only to those who it stole from. Because to those who it  _ took,  _ it was freeing. Oikawa had known that before Iwaizumi had figured it out, apparently. 

 

Oikawa had been the definition of ethereal. But he’d been too ethereal, then, and in the end it all must have caught up to him in the form of a brutish mind and a ineradicable solution. He’d stopped hurting, but in doing so he’d handed Iwaizumi the hurt that he couldn’t seem to shake off. Iwaizumi took it. And he would have taken it then, too. Maybe if Oikawa had handed some of it  _ to  _ him, Iwaizumi could have had some of it in the first place, and Oikawa wouldn’t have hurt so badly that it would have come to this. 

 

Rambling and aching aside, Iwaizumi returned to his original philosophy. Had Oikawa ever been something beautiful? To Iwaizumi he’d been, but had he been beautiful in the eyes of such a mean world? With his aching soul and broken breath and bitter resolve? Probably not. But had he ever been  _ terrible? _ For all his bitterness and anger, it had only ever really been made by himself for himself. And for all his unbearable narcissism it had never really been as real as he let it seem to be. 

 

So in the end, he was only ever somewhere right in the middle. 

 

He’d been beautiful and terrible and painful and wonderful all at the same time, but he’d been sure enough that he’d be going before he was ever more beautiful or terrible in the slightest. 

 

Iwaizumi could recall a lot of moments when he’d found Oikawa somewhat intolerable. 

 

Like when they’d been little and Oikawa had stolen all of Iwaizumi’s blankets to pile them all up right in the middle of Iwaizumi’s room, and Iwaizumi had disliked the mess of it. Or every time that Oikawa would sneak in through Iwaizumi’s window in the middle of the night--honestly, did the boy have no sense of time?

 

Iwaizumi could recall with great memory the time that Oikawa had first found out that he’d hurt his knee, and after crying over it for a long enough amount of time he’d lazed about and had gotten Iwaizumi to do everything physical for him, like the lazy lump that he always was. And Iwaizumi could recall with impressive clarity all the girlfriends that Oikawa had once had, all the girls he’d never loved. Were any of them at the funeral that Iwaizumi had flat-out skipped? Probably not. If they were, it was only out of obligation. 

 

Iwaizumi could remember when they’d grown older, when they’d played volleyball games they’d been sure that they’d win, and Oikawa would go around and watch all of their opponents. Generally, if they lost a big match, Oikawa would sit at home and mope for days at a time. God knows what went through his head during those times. If Iwaizumi had known, then, maybe he wouldn’t be standing in the middle of a muddy-abyss-looking-glorified-creek. 

 

But Iwaizumi had understood that well enough that, when they’d lost what was potentially the biggest, most important match of Oikawa’s life, he’d assumed Oikawa would take the longest mope of his life. Instead, he’d called Oikawa’s mother to discover that Oikawa had managed to drag himself up and out to go and go out to watch the very game which he’d wanted to play so badly. When Iwaizumi had shown up (it was coincidence, of course, and nothing more) he’d been peering down with his glasses slipping down his nose, and he’d started when Iwaizumi had spoken, like  he’d been worried he’d get scolded. But if he was aching at all, Iwaizumi hadn’t seen it then.

 

He saw it now. 

 

He saw the way that Oikawa hurt, and he felt it. Iwaizumi felt all the pain and longing and aching that Oikawa held, and he didn’t want to  _ let it go.  _

 

Iwaizumi remembered all of the time after that, too. He remembered Oikawa deciding not to even continue volleyball, remembered being shocked but going with it as smoothly as possible because Oikawa seemed agitated with the fact that everyone else was telling him he should have kept going with it. And he remembered painting the walls of their run-down apartment and when Oikawa strung up Christmas lights in the middle of June because he ‘felt like it’, and nobody ever took them down. There was a rumpled looking kitten with a chunk of ear and tail missing that Oikawa had insisted on rescuing from the streets after a storm, and Iwaizumi absolutely hated that cat now because she wouldn’t stop meowing for Oikawa, didn’t she understand that he was gone? 

 

But in all of Iwaizumi’s pain, he wasn’t  _ special.  _

  
Everybody had something that they’d lost. Everybody had something that they loved. Everybody had something that they feared. And to Iwaizumi, Oikawa was all three. 

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr: Aobajosighs  
> Feel free to send head canons, prompts and starters for any Haikyuu ship. (Please, I'm rare pair garbage.)


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